Fire Simulation Summer School Last Month

In the beginning of August, I participated with colleagues in a five-day summer school in Jülich, Germany – the topic of the event being fire (combustion) simulations. Combustion being the multiphysics problem it is, the lectures contained material about turbulent flows, chemical reaction kinetics, thermal radiation, heat conduction and so on, with detailed descriptions of the numerical methods used for solving the problems.

The Supercomputing Center of Jülich is apparently doing work on weather simulations and other complex fluid mechanics problems, as well as crowd dynamics (behavior of many AI-controlled “individuals” when moving through constrained spaces. A video about the research activities was playing in the lobby next to the lecture room.

Can’t find a YouTube version of that video, sorry. The computers themselves were in a hall on a lower floor, and there was lots of noise in there because of the humming of the machines and the flow of cooling water (the computing converts lots of electrical energy to heat and the room temperature would get out of control without cooling).

In the lectures we had about 20 participants and five lecturers, as far as I can remember (the green view from the window nicely softened the “technical” atmosphere).

The accommodation was in the nearby city of Aachen, where there was lots of really old buildings and other tourist attractions.

Finally, here’s me with my friend Deepak (on the left), standing in front of a cathedral in Köln (Cologne).